Soul Cakes

[00:00] I'm really excited for this next segment. We haven't done one of these in a while.
[00:03] Coalson, I hear you have an under-Google-able question that is not about tools, hopefully.
[00:12] That is true. Under-Google-ables? That was the play of it. I'm super excited.
[00:25] You told us we had to, sir.
[00:28] We signed up for it. In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give you.
[00:36] No, I lean on you guys for my knowledge. I figure collectively we can come up with the answers to
[00:44] things. I'm hoping you have an answer to this. Just recently, Halloween. What's the deal with
[00:53] Halloween? What's the history behind it? Where did it come from?
[00:57] Hallows' Eve. It's like a pagan thing, right? Sure. This is my first thing, right? There's
[01:03] the All Saints Day on the 1st of November. Did the Christians take the pagan holiday
[01:17] and try to make it their own somehow? Isn't that what they always do?
[01:20] Yeah, that's their main go-to movie. That is their main go-to movie.
[01:25] That's their movie. Jesus was born in June or something, but they're like,
[01:28] oh, we need something for this. That's their killer crossover.
[01:31] Yeah, exactly. He's going to take this from the pagans and make it ours.
[01:36] But specifically, if it's a pagan holiday about death, is it a thing where we're
[01:49] worshiping our dead forefathers? I imagine it has to do with something that's related
[02:00] to the cycle of the seasons. It falls at the end of the fall. You have your harvest festival,
[02:07] and then everything is dying off. You commemorate just the cycle of life that things die and
[02:16] are reborn or whatever. What's the earth god that you pray to in the fall? Because in the spring,
[02:21] it's like, oh, the sun god. We need a good harvest. Who do you pray to in the fall?
[02:27] I don't know. Moon god? Yeah. The not blizzard god? Who's the anti-blizzard god?
[02:34] Exactly. At least they don't want us to be cold, man.
[02:40] That would be my guess. It's about the dying of the land sort of thing.
[02:46] But I mean, all paganism had to do with rebirth, too.
[02:55] I could see that. You've got to carve up your pumpkin. Otherwise, it'll go bad.
[03:06] As the old adage goes.
[03:09] There was a big festival, though, and presumably, you did. I don't know. You had stuff that would
[03:16] go bad that you had through the summer. I don't know.
[03:18] Sure. That's when you make your pumpkin pie. Yeah.
[03:21] So this is like, so so when we talk about the pagans, we're talking about like the
[03:28] who is this? I mean, we're randomly pre Christian societies.
[03:34] Okay. In northern Europe.
[03:38] In any places where Christianity, right, because as Christianity took hold,
[03:43] they were specifically targeting. I mean, it was a marketing campaign, right?
[03:47] So they're specifically targeting those who didn't believe in their thing.
[03:51] And so they came up with, yeah, Hallows' Eve, right, to specifically pull people away from
[03:59] their particular brand of paganism. So it may have even differed throughout the,
[04:04] you know, what is now the Christian West. I see. Sure.
[04:09] But yeah, but my understanding is that, yeah, when we talk about pagans, yeah,
[04:14] it's European, pre-Christian Europeans, basically. Right.
[04:19] And there were multiple varieties. So yes, but as far as I understand,
[04:25] yeah, that's no, no, I think you're right. But I think that a lot of these sort of
[04:28] pre-Christian societies had similar, similar festivals, right? So I like this idea that it's,
[04:33] it's a fall fest. It's a harvest festival. It's a harvest festival.
[04:36] And then so it's like, probably like you harvest everything. And then,
[04:42] and then everybody gets a good game. And then you pray to, I don't know,
[04:47] the weak God. Right. I don't know. And you eat pumpkin pie.
[04:49] And you eat pumpkin pie. It's the only thing that matters to Coles. As long as it's pumpkin pie,
[04:54] I'm a pagan. You had to carve the pumpkin before it went bad. And then you made the pie. That's
[05:01] how it works. That's why, yeah, that's how everything works. Also, candy somehow gets involved.
[05:07] Um, and, um, well, I'm pretty sure that's just in the ghouls and stuff.
[05:12] I'm pretty sure that's an American thing, right? That's just, yeah.
[05:16] Can we get it? Can we get a guess on when the pagan holiday would have started? Can we
[05:20] get like some sort of the pagan holiday or no? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess.
[05:27] I mean, I think that's more or less prehistoric.
[05:31] Okay. So when, when the Christians took it over, probably would have been around
[05:37] the middle ages. Yeah. I'd say, you know, 1500 ish. I'm gonna go with like a thousand.
[05:45] You're going a thousand. You're going, you're going, you're going early.
[05:48] Yeah. I'm going early. Yeah. No, you may be right. And they may have attempted something
[05:55] previously that didn't, that didn't take hold. Right. Because long after, you know,
[06:02] the, the monarchs and the royal classes were praying to Jeebus. Um,
[06:07] most of their populace was still rocking pagan gods. Right.
[06:14] All right. Do we feel like we learned enough about Halloween there? Should we, uh,
[06:18] yeah, let's not look it up. I like it. Uh, I don't know where I'm at. I'm on Jehovah's Witnesses.
[06:29] I'm pretty sure that's a pagan site. So the Bible does not mention Halloween. However,
[06:34] both ancient origins of Halloween and its modern customs show it to be celebration
[06:39] based on false beliefs about the dead and invisible spirits or demons.
[06:44] Ooh, the false belief actual place, um, uh, is widely believed that many Irish,
[06:51] yeah, many, many Halloween traditions originated from ancient Celtic harvest festivals,
[06:57] particularly the Gaelic and Samhain. Um, Samhain itself was Christianized
[07:07] as Halloween by the early church, but it doesn't give me dates.
[07:13] Some believe, however, that Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday separate, uh,
[07:18] from ancient festivals like Samhain. That sounds like that's not true.
[07:22] Yeah. Live sciences. Halloween can be traced back about 2000 years. Oh wow.
[07:30] That's not so that's like, I would have thought it would have been old, but that's like zero.
[07:34] Yeah. That's off by a little bit.
[07:39] Let's see the feast of all hollows on its current date in the Western church,
[07:43] maybe traced to Pope Gregory the third, uh, 731 to 741 founding on an oratory in Saint
[07:49] Peter's for the relics of, uh, the holy apostles and of all saints, martyrs and confessors. So
[07:55] interesting. So they were striking back against a celebration of death, uh, by celebrating a
[08:02] bunch of dead people. So way to go Christianity. That was, uh, well, well played.
[08:10] Um, I, yeah, okay. So yeah, I've got the, the, uh, seltz, the keltz, the keltz,
[08:15] the keltz celebrated their new year on November the first and marked the end of summer and the
[08:22] harvest and the beginning of the cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human
[08:27] death. Uh, Keltz believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the
[08:32] worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. And the night of October 31st, they celebrated
[08:38] Samhain when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.
[08:45] In England, from the medieval period up until the 1930s, people practiced the Christian
[08:51] custom of souling on Halloween, which evolved groups of solars like carolers, both Protestant
[09:00] and Catholic going from parish to parish, begging for, begging the rich for soul cakes in exchange
[09:04] for praying for the souls of the givers and their friends. So soul cakes is, uh, the name
[09:11] I've been in high school. So what you're really interested in Coalson is, uh, the origins of
[09:20] pumpkin pie. Yes. And pumpkin pie actually is much more recent than you might think. It actually
[09:28] is born out of, you know, the historical first Thanksgiving in America. So native Americans
[09:37] grew squash and pumpkins, but, uh, the English settlers weren't too, uh, impressed with it. So
[09:46] they started making torts out of the pumpkins. And then eventually by the 1670s recipes for a sort of
[09:55] pumpion pie, uh, we're starting to appear in English cookbooks.
[10:00] Oh, other foods associated with Halloween. Barnbrack in Ireland, bonfire toffee in
[10:08] Great Britain. And of course, in Ireland and Scotland, Scotland, monkey nuts, which is,
[10:17] which is peanuts in their shells. Apparently if you're in Ireland or Scotland,
[10:22] which is now the name of the show.
[10:28] There you go. Now you know about, uh, Halloween pumpkin pie and monkey nuts.
[10:32] All Hallows Eve.